This is a book about a small Southern Italian village and its offshoots in Toronto. It's about bread and figs and food in general, about Carnival and pilgrimages to religious sanctuaries, about fathers, mothers and children, about migrating and about remaining, about yearning to leave if you've stayed and yearning to make the trek back if you've gone, about how both those who travel and those who never stray from home change. But it's also about what it may mean to write an ethnography of the place you've chosen to continue to inhabit and about how an array of houses in one of the most forlorn backwaters of Europe can actually be in the thick of current history. Mixing fiction and non-fiction, autobiography, portraits of friends and co-villagers, anecdotes, short tales and the reflections of the specialist, it's also about how anthropology can be literature and literature anthropology. In short, it's a book sure to become a classic.

Vito Teti teaches at the University of Calabria. One of Italy’s major living anthropologists, he has published over a dozen works. Stones into Bread is the first to appear in English. Editor, translator, author, Francesco Loriggio has published extensively on both modern Italian literature and Italian Canadian literature. Toronto’s Damiano Pietropaolo is an award winning writer/broadcaster, director, translator, essayist, reviewer and educator.

Vito Teti's profile page

Pier Giorgio Di Cicco was born in Italy but moved with his family to Canada as a child. Author of many books of poetry and a founder of the Association of Italian-Canadian Writers, he is Toronto’s Poet Laureate for the years 2004—2007.

Francesco Loriggio is professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at Carleton University, Ottawa. He has published extensively on literary theory, modern Italian literature, and Italian-Canadian literature. He is a translator of some of the works of the Italian playwright Achille Campanile (The Inventor of the Horse and Other Short Plays), and the editor of Social Pluralism And Literary History.

Francesco Loriggio's profile page

Toronto’s Damiano Pietropaolo is an award winning writer/broadcaster, director, translator, and educator. Translations include: selections from Italian Renaissance drama and dramatic theory (Sources of Dramatic Theory, Volume 1, Cambridge University Press, 1991); Ugo Betti’s The Queen and the Rebels (Pro Arte Productions, Toronto, 1997); The Fellini Radio Plays, translated and adapted for the stage from radio plays by Federico Fellini (Stratford Festival 2002); a play Love Letters from the Empty Bed, adapted from Ovid’s Heroides, (staged at the Glenn Morris Studio Theatre and the Canadian Opera Company’s Bradshaw Amphitheatre, 2012); and the novel Between Rothko and Three Windows: Murder at the Art Gallery of Ontario (Quattro books, 2016). Essays, reviews and creative non-fiction have appeared in Saturday Night Magazine, The Globe and Mail, Grail Magazine, CBC Radio, and Il Quotidiano della Calabria. As editor, director and producer Damiano explored the theme of exile and return and the emergence of a post-national drama in such series as Where is Here? The Drama of Immigration (Scirocco Books, 2005), Little Italies (2006, CBC Audio Books, 2007). Essays, poetry and short fiction have been translated into Italian and published in A Filo Doppio, Ed. By Francesco Loriggio and Vito Teti, Donzelli, Rome 2017.

Damiano Pietropaolo's profile page

It’s quite rare to run across such a symbiosis of rigorous analysis and poetic sense of life, of life’s passing and its enduring, of its floundering and its re-emergence. Perhaps the great anthropologists are the real poets of modernity, founders, as much as discoverers, of buried cities and disappearing civilizations, but founders in so far as they are discoverers and discoverers in so far as they are the founders of perennial values that are refracted, changing but never disappearing, in the flux of time.

Claudio Magris, author of Blameless

Every book by Vito Teti is a blessing. His stories about the Italian South, about Southern Italian mobility, unfold as anthropological narratives: men who migrate hoping to make their luck in America, women who listen as in a dream …

Roberto Saviano, author of Gomorrah

Every book by Vito Teti is a blessing. His stories about the Italian South, about Southern Italian mobility, unfold as anthropological narratives: men who migrate hoping to make their luck in America, women who listen as in a dream ... --Roberto Saviano, author of Gomorrah It's quite rare to run across such a symbiosis of rigorous analysis and poetic sense of life, of life's passing and its enduring, of its floundering and its re-emergence. Perhaps the great anthropologists are the real poets of modernity, founders, as much as discoverers, of buried cities and disappearing civilizations, but founders in so far as they are discoverers and discoverers in so far as they are the founders of perennial values that are refracted, changing but never disappearing, in the flux of time. --Claudio Magris, author of Blameless